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We are starting this project with the French presidential election as our focus and will investigate stories, comments, images and videos about candidates, political parties and all other election related issues.

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However, in very clear photos taken during the same debate, no earpiece appears in the ear in question of the En Marche! candidate.

Both France 2 and TF1, the broadcasters that co-organized the debate, cut short this rumor. “France Televisions denies this story”, the public broadcaster told AFP, a partner of CrossCheck. “There were no headsets for the candidates during this debate, in conjunction with the production control room”, confirmed TF1’s director of communications.

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This supposed scoop ended up looking more like a dud. On May 3rd, just before the Emmanuel Macron vs Marine Le Pen debate ahead of the second round, a person posted documents on an English-speaking forum supposedly offering “proof” of an offshore account opened by the En Marche! candidate. Marine Le Pen appears to have referred to this rumor during the debate by saying: “I hope that we will not learn that you had an offshore account in the Bahamas“. The trajectory of the rumor’s propagation as well as incoherencies in the posted documents would suggest that the accusation is “fake”.

Several elements in the documents raise questions, from the opening date of the account (May 4th, 2012, the day before François Hollande became president), to Emmanuel Macron’s signature which differs from the one used in the program En Marche!, notably in the letter “M” of Macron.

Signature in the supposed contract Signature in the En Marche! program

According to an offshore contracts’ specialist who asked to remain anonymous, “these types of documents are never signed by the person concerned; it is precisely the aim of these kinds of deposits: to remain anonymous”.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting local financial authorities, states that no firm by the name of La Providence has been registered in Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Furthermore, a technical analysis of the two documents shows that they were scanned on the morning of May 3rd. A piece of software which enables the extraction of images from a PDF file strengthens the suspicion that the signature page of the contract and fax were edited. In both cases the software extracts three images when it should only extract one if the document was authentic.

On May 5th, a user claiming to be the source of the document leak republished them in better quality on the 4chan.org forum.

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Several websites campaigning against Emmanuel Macron, such as Fdesouche.com, resistancerepublicaine.eu and lagauchematuer.fr claimed that the candidate’s wife quickly erased her Twitter account after launching a survey on April 29th regarding second round votes, due to the result being favorable to Marine Le Pen. However, Brigitte Macron’s supposed Twitter account turned out to be a fake account.

“We are launching a little poll 1 week before the election! Who are you supporting in the second round?”, can be read in the screenshot of a Tweet from the account @BMacronOff which uses a picture of Brigitte Macron. The tweet was used widely by the aforementioned websites. The survey results vary depending on the time at which the screenshot was taken, but all of them name Marine Le Pen as the winner with a large majority (63 to 73% of voters).

“Brigitte Macron launches a poll about the second round, and the result is not what she expected”, states website lagauchematuer.fr. “Brigitte Macron received a slap in the face with her online poll“, adds resistancerepublicaine.eu. The far-right website Fdesouche.com wondered if Mrs Macron did not suppress these polls “because of the results”, before deleting its own article which CrossCheck found thanks to an internet archival tool.

The reason for this turnaround is quite simple: many elements reveal that Brigitte Macron has no connection with the Twitter account @BMacronOff. This account is not certified by Twitter, yet almost every public personality (and certainly political ones) are certified by Twitter. Furthermore, the account @BMacronOff was not active before the poll, and has since been suspended.

When contacted by Le Monde, a CrossCheck project partner, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team confirmed that Brigitte Macron did not own any Twitter account.

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“Richard Ferrand, likely future minister of Macron, finances the hatred of the Jews,” claimed www.dreuz.info on April 25. This site, which claims to be “conservative, Christian and pro-Israel”, denounced the funding granted by the deputy of Finistère “with its 2016 parliamentary reserve” to the France Palestine Solidarity Association (AFPS), labelling the association as both “anti-Zionist” and “anti-Semitic “.

Although the AFPS criticizes Israeli policy, it does not contest Israel’s right to exist, and the donation made by the secretary-general of En Marche!, to the amount of 2,000 euros, concerns only one humanitarian project carried out by the association founded in France in May 2001.

In its statutes, the AFPS further states that its purpose is “to work for the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East based on the recognition of the national rights of the Palestinian people on the basis of international law” .

Richard Ferrand, the right-hand man of Emmanuel Macron, reacted on his blog on March 26, 2017, soon after the rumor appeared in other publications.

“I donated € 2,000 of ‘my’ parliamentary reserve to support a project of providing equipment for a class of girls in the camp of El Aroub in Palestine,” he said in his post: “To finish a rumor from the fachosphere “.

“This territory is twinned with the commune of Carhaix located in my electoral district (I live in Motreff, the village immediately next door) .The project was carried by the central Brittany branch of the France-Palestine Association, through its head Jean-Pierre Jeudy, honorary mayor, retired professor, as well as with various people involved in local community life,” he added.